Problems with Hell/Sin

[puzzleannie]

Lazerlike42:

I’ve recently begun to see holes left and right in the Catholic understanding of sin and Hell, or at least holes in my understanding of what the understanding is. Please try to address these.

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others will respond more wisely to your questions but I would like to highlight the humility and willingness to be open to instruction apparent in your introduction. wish we could all display this attitude more often.

 

[Contarini]

Lazerlike42:

I’ve recently begun to see holes left and right in the Catholic understanding of sin and Hell, or at least holes in my understanding of what the understanding is.

Well, first of all most of the issues you address aren’t Catholic issues per se. They are ways in which even most conservative Catholics are relatively liberal compared to the way Christianity has often been formulated in the past (particularly the past 500-700 years–in many ways patristic and earlier medieval views are more “liberal”). I think that most of the “liberal” things to which you refer are basically correct. But a traditionalist Catholic would condemn them just as much as a fundamentalist or even ultra-traditional confessional Protestant.

First, it’s always said that God doesn’t condemn us to Hell but we choose it freely. However, in all of the parables and descriptions in Scripture we see God (or whatever represents Him in the parables) commanding sinners (or whatever represents them) to go to Hell.

I don’t think this is an either/or. You admit that it’s symbolic. You should push this a bit farther and recognize that all language about God is, as Aquinas would say, analogical. That is to say, it is impossible to speak with total accuracy about God–it is possible to say things about God that are not false, they will still be inadequate. Furthermore, traditionally any language that attributes to God either physical properties *or *emotions is not just analogical but metaphorical. And finally, Aquinas and Catholic theology generally is clear that God causes good things but permits evils. Now I should recognize that in Aquinas the punishment of evil is seen as a good, so Aquinas had no problem with God actively sending people to hell. But God does not actively *cause *people to go to hell.

If we take a more patristic view I think we get closer to the modern attitude you’re finding problematic. The Fathers had a very strong sense of Satan’s agency in the world, and they saw Satan as for instance the agent of God’s wrath into whose power we fell when Adam sinned and from whom Christ ransomed us. Medieval theologians like Anselm found this language inadequate, because they thought it detracted from God’s power. I think they were wrong. God’s wrath is, in my view, an abandonment to the power of Satan, and it is the result of our own choice to turn away from God. The Biblical metaphors are of course correct–as metaphors. As you put it, they “correspond.” They correspond to God’s choice (not that God could do otherwise and still be God) to allow us to experience the results of the choices we have insisted on making. I simply don’t see a contradition between this interpretation and the Biblical language.

Now of course this does fit well with the idea of God is Love and Love requires justice idea, but that isn’t what is taught.

But how does it not fit with the idea that Christ sorrowfully allows us to live in the world we have made for ourselves? Note that Matt. 25 strongly implies that hell was in some sense not intended for us: it is “created for the devil and his angels.” It’s not our natural habitat, but we can make it ours by refusing to show mercy to others (which is the specific focus in that parable). Granted, the imagery is much harsher than most people would use today, but I don’t see that the meaning is different.

This ties directly into the problem with what sin is. I have always heard it taught, by very educated and orthodox Catholics, that sin is not simply breaking a set of laws, but is rather truly and deeply nothing more or less than the act of falling short of true happiness.

See Servais Pinckaers, *Sources of Christian Ethics, *for a marvellous exposition of this view. He argues that this is the view of the Fathers and of Aquinas and that the more rule-based approach began in the late Middle Ages (not that earlier writers didn’t talk about rules and laws, but that their ethics was primarily rooted in their conception of the purpose of human life as happiness in God).

 

[Contarini]

In other words, we are made for a certain purpose, and acts are sinful because they work against making us what God designed us to be and make us something else. This makes a lot of sense, but it seems to create problems when we think about temporal punishment. If we’re breaking God’s rules, I can see punishment being necessary. If we’re just sortof… not being what we’re supposed to be, then I don’t see why there is a punishment for that other than what comes naturally from that. In other words, I don’t see why God needs to do it.

Well, I do have a problem (but then I’m a Protestant) with the way the later medieval writers (even Aquinas) speak of temporal punishment. I think this legal approach to temporal punishment is a major culprit in terms of provoking the Reformation. But I don’t see why “temporal punishment” can’t be defined in terms of the consequences of our actions. I remember a (Protestant) professor in college trying to explain Purgatory and indulgences to us (this was a Protestant school so it was a tough job and he did it well). His example was that if you eat nothing but pizza for months and you gain 300 pounds, you may repent and be forgiven but you still have to lose weight (I may have the details wrong!). I’ve always thought that was a good explanation. Our actions do stuff to us. Temporal punishment, as I understand it, is simply the damage done to us by our own sinful actions.

I’m not going to be any help explaining how this fits with indulgences, because I naturally don’t believe in indulgences . . . .

Lastly (but what is troubling me the most) concerns the actual “definition” of Hell. It is taught all the time that Hell is best seen as the state of being without God, and often taught that it’s not really a place at all.

Yes, I thought that too for a while. Jerry Walls’s excellent book on hell convinced me otherwise (Hell: The Logic of Damnation). Walls is a Methodist, but I also have a very smart and very traditional Catholic friend who argues that heaven and hell must be in some sense places. It’s quite simple: if we have risen bodies (even if they aren’t quite like the bodies we have now) they must exist in a place (obviously this doesn’t apply to the intermediate states of heaven and hell).

Again, I don’t think the two concepts contradict. Wherever there is a person who is as devoid of God’s presence as it is possible to be, there is hell.

My concern is that it says in Matthew 25 (and is taught) that Hell was created for the Satan and his angels. Two things then. 1) If Hell was created, how can it simply be the state of being without God?

And that’s where I think the “not a place” language is flawed. The way I see it, hell is a kind of quarantine–God does not allow evil to infect the universe, so those who finally reject Him are banished to a place where they will only torment each other.

1. WE as humans were designed to be with God, so therefore the state of being without Him would be terrible for us. Angels were not,

I’m not sure what you mean by that. How are the blessed angels not “with God”? And it’s pretty solid Christian tradition that demons are fallen angels who were created to enjoy God’s presence but fell from that state.

In other words, there’s got to be a pain aspect to it aside from the state of it.

I don’t see how that follows. Why would being without God not be extremely painful, for human beings or angels?

Also, my own speculation (it’s no more than that) is that the “darkness” imagery is God’s absence and the “fire” imagery is God’s presence, since after all God cannot be truly absent from anywhere. Hell is the place where God’s merciful and loving action is absent, because the damned have relentlessly chosen to shut Him out; but God’s fiery holiness which pervades the universe cannot be shut out, and is experienced as excruciating torment.

That’s how I see it, anyway.

Edwin